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adeelarshad82 writes "Microsoft officially unveiled its Windows Phone 7 mobile operating system, announcing that it will be available on a total of five devices in the US. Windows Phone 7 handsets from AT&T and T-Mobile will begin shipping in November, while devices from Sprint and Verizon will be available next year. In all, Microsoft announced nine Windows Phone 7 phones, the remainder of which will be available in Canada, Mexico, the UK, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Singapore, and Australia. It will debut in some European markets on Oct. 21. While early signs are encouraging for Windows Phone 7, it is being deemed as do or die for the future of Microsoft's business."

So they really expect to take over the market share that RIM/Apple/Android have over the cellphone industry? From what I've read it's a step forward for the windows mobile OS but it's not going to tear anything up. And this from a.net developer who loves his Droid X.

mini's been saying the same thing - that WP7 is the product that will hopefully tie Microsoft together (but comments are weighing heavily towards the "or else" scenario)

And mainly: it's a very poor matter of timing for a break-up. We're about to have a mobile phone come out that actually binds the companies divisions far closer than ever before: Office, Windows Live, Xbox Live, Bing, and Dev Div: this damn thing is the antidote for break-up talk. WP7 wouldn't be impossible to create with a break-up, but it'd be exceptionally difficult. WP7 is pulling together huge resources that none of our direct competitors have.

what do they have to draw people away from Apple, Android, or Blackberry?

XBox Live integration

Windows Live integration

Office integration

Free "sync to cloud" and "find my phone"

ZunePass

Zune software is much better on Windows than iTunes

Works better with Windows (which is what most people use... iPhone works better with OS X, so I don't think those people are the target)

I use iPhone on Windows, and I'm very much looking forward to being able to uninstall iTunes and never have to fire up that piece of crap again. And the ZunePass rocks (it's a great deal), and that too is enticing for me.

For business types (not me), the Office integration might be a draw. I can see that.

According to one of TFA: "Copy and paste functionality will be available as an update in early 2011." (Apparently this functionality is also missing in the Slashdot reply box! Who knew!)
In any case, it is ridiculous that the phones will not have this functionality right from the start.

Sharepoint? You've never used it - Drupal is a lot better from almost every viewpoint.

Silverlight? So good its only got a 60% market share (accrding to Microsoft) and they're looking at partnering/buying Adobe for Flash.

Expression suite isn't so bad, but its a bit like FrontPage for the hackery it puts in your designs. Take a look at all the expression dlls the generated code references.

C# 4.0 - dynamic types (and crap like extension methods) is weakening the language. Now, you can slap code together like a scripting language, and most code will have just the same amount of quality to it as a lot of script has.

You don't need the whole SDK, just ADB (which is bundled with the SDK). adb install app.apk. There is probably also a method to install from rooted (su'd) terminal on Android. pm install app.apk? I've only used pm for uninstalling, so that last command is a total guess.

Anyway, I concur with the previous AC. Google would have done themselves a benefit had they wrote an add-in for Visual Studio. It's not that difficult. Probably no one at Google uses VS, but that's not a good excuse to ignore it when welcoming developers to the platform.

From the page you linked: "Development in C++ will not be permitted." So how does one automatically translate an app written in standard C++ into C# or the verifiably type-safe subset of C++/CLI? I agree that the front-end of an app needs a rewrite per platform, but the back-end that implements business rules or game physics should be identical on all supported platforms.

But iTunes has got to be one of the worst, most bloated, most annoying applications I've ever loaded on my PC (and that's saying something)

I'm confused. What do you need iTunes for, exactly?
You can use Media Monkey to sync your media onto your iPhone. With iOS 4 you can create playlists on the phone.
You can download and install apps from the phone. After buying an app on one device you can download it free on another with the same account (why doesn't this apply to media?).
The only reason you'd need iTunes would be to perform backups and to activate your phone the first time you use it. Considering that backups don't actually back up everything (definitely a negative, Apple, I'm looking at app settings and information), you really just need iTunes once.
The last time I synced my iPod Touch was mid June, and the last time I synced my iPhone was August 2nd, when I upgraded to iOS 4.
And this is on a Mac, where iTunes is a staple!

It doesn't. LucasArts doesn't even have a patent on droid. They applied for it in 2002(?) and it got denied last year. The threat of a lawsuit was all it took for Motorola though, now they're in a contract to avoid being sued.

Danger was mostly consumer-level gear, wasn't it? Plus I think they were buying the engineering team.

Well the idea was that buying Danger would allow them to quickly develop a consumer phone that appealed to teenagers. The Danger Hiptop (known as Sidekicks) were very popular with teenagers as texting was all the rage then. The problem for MS is that internal decisions would delay and doom the product. Danger apps ran on Java. So MS being MS decided that every product must eat the MS dogfood so the next model would use Windows CE. The Pink Project fell under the Windows Mobile division and the head of the division didn't want both Windows Mobile and Pink. So he refused to divert any resources to assist the Pink team. Due to those two factors, the phone was delayed 18 months. At the same time, they made a deal with Verizon to sell it which would use a cheaper data plan. But since they were 18 months late, Verizon didn't feel like giving them any discount pricing. After all, 18 months is like 2 generations in cell phone lifetime. Even if MS bought Danger for the team, they squandered the resources.

The 65% failure number may be somewhat high, but the numbers in the two surveys I found aren't reassuring. There's no way that I would knowingly put my hard-earned money into a product that failed about half of the time. I can't believe that MS wasn't forced to recall the systems.

If you'd rather use your phone as a USB mass storage device that is possible as well - just install wm5storage and you're set.

In a weird sense these Windows Mobile phones are actually quite hacker friendly. You treat them more or less like you would treat a bare-bones DOS or Windows 3.x machine by replacing anything not working the way you want it and adding what Microsoft deemed unnecessary (like the mentioned wm5storage program). It will still crash but that seems to be the norm in mobile phone land. My previous phone - a Nokia n-Gage - crashed. My wife's Sony Ericcson C702 crashes. My bowlderized HTC Prophet )which replaced the n-Gage when its screen cracked) crashes. When the thing finally dies its successor will probably crash as well... unfortunately.

C# 4.0 - dynamic types (and crap like extension methods) is weakening the language. Now, you can slap code together like a scripting language, and most code will have just the same amount of quality to it as a lot of script has.

You cannot "slap code together" because C# still doesn't give you the way to define those dynamic classes easily, only to consume them (well, okay, ExpandoObject veers somewhat into JS territory, but without prototypes). "dynamic" stuff is intended to easily use code that is already written in a dynamically typed language or framework (Python, Ruby, COM IDispatch etc), not to write your own C# code that way. And that is how it is used, pretty much - so far the only production code with "dynamic" I've seen was for COM only.

As for extension methods, they're not dynamic in any way - they're statically resolved, and are purely a convenient syntactic sugar to write "x.list()" instead of "Collections.list(x)".

It's very good for "everyday web" but is not perfect. It doesn't support HTML5 yet - apparently IE9's rendering engine will be ported Soon(tm) but has not yet been - but damn near everything pages rendered perfectly including a few pages that mobile Webkit browsers fail at (most seemed to involve frames, which are old but not-yet-dead tech). It's fast and the zooming is super-smooth. I've only played with it for a few minutes, but all the reviews I read state that the browser experience is excellent even if the rendering engine is outdated. No Flash yet, though.

Well, of course everything can be passed around with streams, since any kind of data is representable with a stream. The question at hand is the convenience of processing of said data. E.g. if you want to filter the output of ls, you have to parse its output stream, e.g. using grep or awk. This is very easy to get wrong, brittle since it does not permit significant variations to output format in future versions (even strict additions could break things), and inefficient performance-wise since you parse text data right after it was formatted to be text from a bunch of internal structures - the whole formatting/parsing part is strictly wasteful.

PowerShell tackles this by providing a higher-level form of data abstraction. It doesn't have to be objects, of course (e.g. I'd prefer s-exprs), but the point is to have something with a well-defined structure. To return to a specific example again, in PSh, ls outputs a collection of objects with certain properties; you can feed that to "object grep", which can filter any collection type on any set of property values, or on the value of an arbitrary expression evaluated in the context of individual collection items.

Note that PSh still guarantees that output of any command is always ultimately representable as a text stream. E.g. if you do "ls > foo.txt", the collection of items will be converted to a string formatting said collection along the lines of classic ls, which is what ends up in the text file. Similarly, if you pipe an object to a process which is not PSh-aware (and therefore expects stdin to be a stream), that process will also get the text representation. So you don't really lose any flexibility compared to Unix - any technique which worked on text streams will keep working.